city life too

It appears those two consecutive nights last week where the temperatures dipped to 30 just before dawn were enough to trigger some color in our deciduous trees.  The city is yellow and burnt orange for the most part except for when it is brown from the dead ones.  The tallows, the ornamental pears and the sweet gum throw some red and bright orange into the mix but its mostly a yellow and brown landscape.  The cypress are a mystery to me because they rightly turn brown and the needles fall.  But they also love water so I guess we won't really know if the cypress survived the drought until spring.

That little frost also took my pole beans even though I covered them.  And it nipped my zucchini, which I also covered, but didn't kill it.  It's in a big pot so I'm prepared to bring it in next time.  Get me a little grow light.

We're in town to do two small jobs.  One we finished up today and the other tomorrow.  But this long hot summer and lack of use required a half day of equipment repair.

Coming back into the city is always interesting.  While I was living there, changes were a little bit more gradual but not entirely.  Even then new construction would spring up whole and leave you trying to remember what had used to be there.

The city is finally repaving the two main arteries, the eastern and western boundaries, our N/S corridors.  In other words, I traveled on those two streets for practically everywhere I wanted to go.  Those were the two closest bridges over Buffalo Bayou, the only natural bayou left in the city (there are 4 major bayous passing through the city and I can name 8 in the larger metropolitan area).  

They have been needing to be repaved for many years but only now that the population density and per capita income in this part of town have both increased considerably has the city finally got around to it.  

I had occasion to go to a mall today, a very large mall, one that I haven't been to for a good many years.  It's a little farther than I ever wanted to go and it's also quite larger than it was last time I went.  I was taking my twin grandgirls to get their hair cut at the place of their choice but this isn't really about that.

It's about all the stuff that is for sale, everyone vying for those dollars.  As if the number of stores itself wasn't overwhelming enough, all the corridors were filled with carts and kiosks and they are all selling stuff!  I couldn't even look at it.  So much totally useless stuff when you really stop to think about it, whose sole purpose in being is to generate the transfer of cash from one pocket to another.  

Although I did see a very cool remote control helicopter that flew and hovered and the operator had it fly right to his hand where he plucked it out of the air.  I kept walking.  We were on a mission, not to be delayed or sidetracked.

The twins got their haircuts, had ice cream and a pretzel, we browsed Claire's, and made it back to the truck in an hour and a half.  Not bad.

Tomorrow we go home.  The cat will be glad.  She was starting to disbelieve in the existence of the dog and was wanting out.  We wouldn't let her out and a little while ago her faith was restored when the dog started barking and making his presence known.